Love, l’oeuf, and tennis

While watching the men’s final at the French Open today, I noticed that the French scorekeeper used “zero” in place of “love” when announcing the score. This is interesting because “love” was originally derived from the French “l’oeuf” which means “egg”, a reference to the egg-shaped numeral zero. The British then bastardized “l’oeuf” into “love”. Apparently, the French no longer use “l’oeuf” or even “amour”, the French translation of “love”, but just plain old “zero”.